Britain: Left Unity moving in the right direction

May 10, 2014 -- Socialist Resistance -- Several hundred members joining in a week after a Ken Loach Guardian
article and a Salman Shaheen appearance on the Daily Politics show … new
branches opening up every week and a well-attended national policy
conference in Manchester … a dozen or more candidates baptising our
electoral intervention in the May local elections.

This is Left Unity (LU) only six months after its founding
conference. Who would have thought a new broad party of the left
launched by an internet appeal and sustained through a Ken Loach cinema
documentary would still be around a year later with nearly 2000 members
and more than 50 branches? Occasionally on the left we need to acknowledge
that we have done something right. Even in a very difficult period where
we have suffered a series of defeats it is possible in a small way to
build something to the left of the Labour Party that has the potential to draw in
wider layers than the revolutionary left normally engages with.

At the same time we can already begin to draw a positive balance
sheet of the overall line adopted at the founding conference and
re-asserted at the recent policy conference. A line Socialist Resistance
(SR) had fully supported, which is to build LU as a broad class-struggle
party which is membership based, transparent and democratic that
brings together anyone willing to fight now against Labour’s
capitulation along anti-capitalist lines. This means people who might or
might not label themselves reformists, revolutionaries, Marxists,
independent, feminist, libertarian or green can find a home in LU.

We
are not building another Leninist group like the Socialist Workers Party or the Socialist
Party. Neither is LU being built as a left-reformist party as some of
its critics claim. Its future dynamic cannot be defined so neatly now.
What is absolutely clear is that spokespeople like Salman or Bianca Todd
present a credible socialist profile – if they were constrained by the
sort of maximalist program the minority platforms were pushing at the
founding conference then we would not be growing in the way we are. A
couple of new members in Hackney specifically name checked Salman’s
appearance. Our small radical currents are in contact with a much wider
audience as a result of that correct framework.

LU policies represent a perfectly adequate tool for raising
transitional demands that relate to the current level of struggles and
consciousness but move them step by step to challenge the power of
capital. Politics is the art of knowing what the next correct move is not
just holding beautiful blueprints for taking power or establishing
socialism.

Does it mean we have all the answers and we are certain LU will
continue to develop in a positive way? Of course not. We have some
humility after the Socialist Alliance and Respect experiences, we have
discussed that a lot. It is early days, there is a very uneven
participation that needs managing, our electoral intervention has to be
built up carefully. Branches are often still quite fragile, people have
come and gone. We have to turn more outwards after the necessary phase
of defining our identity and developing radical but credible policies.
As a radical Marxist current we have to learn how to work effectively in
such a party. It is no good expecting all the members to be active in
the ways an SWP member is. Different levels of participation are
perfectly acceptable if we want to aim to be a small mass party.

Wary of 'Leninists'

We are not carrying out entry work like many of us did before in the
Labour Party. Socialist Resistance believes we have to build LU as a
whole, our job is not to build up a revolutionary faction inside it. We
are not intervening in it with a prediction of an inevitable split or on
a fishing expedition, where we can pick up some recruits. We don’t see
our task at the present time of fighting a reformist current or
leadership in the party. We want to work side by side with those
independent forces like Andrew Burgin, Kate Hudson, Bianca, Salman and
others. That’s why you don’t see SR comrades all sitting in a little
bloc at the different conferences or having caucuses or producing
detailed line by line instructions in our press on how to vote. We do
not impose strict discipline on comrades in LU in their day to day work –
just as Lenin’s early Bolsheviks often operated. Comrades are not
expected to speak or vote against what they believe. Party lines and
discipline in that way miseducates people and results in smash ups like
Respect. Many independents inside LU are very wary of "Leninist" groups
trying to manipulate things and they are right about the past history of
this

Most of us debating how to work with LU agree with the analysis that
there is a political space to the left of Labour opened up by its
shift to managing capitalist austerity in a period when even
some reforms are impossible. At the same time all mainstream political
parties are seen as part of the democratic deficit by more and more
voters. The expenses scandals and lack of working-class representation
in the Labour Party reinforces this.

The LU project flows from that analysis – you
don’t have to be in the Labour Party to begin to build a serious
political alternative to Labour. But some of the differences between
ourselves and groups wanting a more leftist profile to LU today revolve
around how you analyse that space and how people are affected
politically by it.

Clearly many people are coming to LU from the Labour
Party, usually from left labourism – we see examples on the LU website
on a regular basis. At the same time the sort of people who in the past
would have been drawn into the Labour Party – trade unionists, young people,
feminists, anti-racists – are repulsed and find themselves in that
space. These people do not come from a labourist background and even
less a Leninist one and many of them do not have labour movement
experience – they are active in campaigns or just angry and want to do
something more political. Finally, we have ex-members of left groups –
splits from SWP who are organised in currents, other individual SWP
members who left on their own or who want to get involved again but
don’t see the Leninist party form à la SWP or SP as the best way forward today.

The problem with what I would define as an ultra-leftist approach
inside LU is that it misunderstands the nature of this space. Of course
there are always some people who will move directly from campaigning or
trade union action to revolutionary involvement but this is a minority
of the people active now in this milieu. The majority of the people
coming into it do not identify with Leninist talk of maximal programs,
workers' militia and the like. They want to do something to fight
the Labour Party’s capitulation, they are broadly anti-capitalist but they do
not necessarily share our notion of the state, revolutionary crisis and
socialist democracy.

There are two ways of approaching this group of activists:

1) You more or less immediately discuss reform or revolution and say
that any partial reforms like taking over the energy companies are traps
to recreate illusions in reformism or that a 35-hour work week is too moderate,
you need to have a demand for 21 hours to really get people moving.

2) Or you meet them where they are, you get them involved in Peoples
Assembly and LU work, you discuss our economic policy, which is not a
full revolutionary program but is not acceptable to capital and will
mobilise people. You provide a forum within which all other questions
can be discussed but you do not try and ram a revolutionary position
down their throats.

More reformists, please

To me the second option is the correct one, it is the one that will
enable us to build a party that can begin to have some mass roots. We
have to learn how to work effectively with people coming to LU from our
right. The influence of radicals and Marxists is inevitably
disproportionate at the moment since we are at the beginning but it will
be perfectly normal for the revolutionary current to be a much smaller
proportion if LU becomes a small mass party. As Tom Walker said in a
recent meeting, we need a lot more reformists inside LU as well as
plenty of revolutionaries.

Some comrades like Workers Power accuse SR of having a "stagist"
approach with our championing of broad left parties. They say first we
want a broad party, maybe eventually a left reformist government and
then later you talk of revolution. They say we end up building illusions
in a reformist approach.

Of course we in SR are not dissolving ourselves. We argue for
revolutionary regroupment and the need for a revolutionary current but
we do not think LU should become the revolutionary
current. Where are the reformist forces leading LU astray at the moment?
Are we realistically talking of being in a left reformist government?
In any case the way a revolutionary crisis will develop here in an
advanced capitalist country with a century of parliamentary democracy
will probably be a combination of left governments and mass
extra-parliamentary struggle with some forms of workplace or community
self-organisation. Does LU have a program that blocks that independent
mass struggle?

We do plead guilty to stagism in one sense. We have a political grasp
of the current period. We say it is unlikely we will see the emergence
of a mass revolutionary party in the immediate future. Our experience
has taught us a little understanding of how working people become
radical and develop political class consciousness. We do not agree with
the comrade from Workers Power who in a recent meeting suggested that
the working class is naturally socialistic. Some individuals might be
immediately drawn to a revolutionary current. Good, but most working
people radicalise normally in stages – very few do it spontaneously in
one go.

Relating to those stages in today’s reality is what we should be
all about. The united front approach and transitional demands are all
about addressing that process of stages in radicalisation. LU fits
within that framework. Those radicals who are always hammering on about
reform and revolution and how the bureaucracy is holding back the
masses who are raring to overthrow capitalism remind me of people who have
to fast forward the video all the time because they want to skip what
they see as the boring bits and get to the action.

Given the nature of the period and its difficulties it is even more
important to adopt an approach that relates to where we are now, not in
some ideal type revolutionary situation where reform and revolution are
posed really concretely as life or death choices, for example in the
period following the ousting of Batista in Cuba after the successful
revolutionary war.

The growth of LU gives it the opportunity to be a player in any
future re-composition on the left. How do we relate to ongoing
developments being discussed by Unite, Counterfire, the Peoples Assembly,
some on the Labour left, the SWP and TUSC. Some comrades around the
Communist Party of Britain think the Peoples Assembly is the most
important political movement in the country and counterpose it to Left
Unity. Counterfire expresses a left version of this line. People are
speculating about future moves by Unite leader Len McCluskey. In the event of a
Labour Party victory or defeat or a Scottish vote for independence – things
could move quickly and we want to be at the centre of any future
recomposition. We need to be open and flexible on this and not be too
gung ho about our own success, thinking we have all the answers and can
be unconcerned about such developments.

Today the task of every radical should be to get stuck into building
Left Unity, we may just have the chance of building something that could
begin to have a real political impact.